1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer systems. In particular, the present invention relates to methods of managing the discrete sensors in server computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many computer systems, such as servers, include system management having various management features. The system management is responsive to various sensors. These sensors may detect, for example, the absence/presence and the operation/failure of a power supply. The sensors may include xe2x80x9cthreshold sensorsxe2x80x9d which provide analog values such as voltage or temperature and xe2x80x9cdiscrete sensorsxe2x80x9d which are sensors of a digital type returning one or two bytes of data, each one of the bits in the data having a value changing between 0 and 1 to identify a sensor status or event occurrence. For example, there might be a plurality of processor status discrete sensors which return bits in response to a query of the sensor indicative of several different characteristics of the corresponding processor. For example, one of the returned bits could indicate whether or not the processor is present, another bit could indicate whether or not there""s been a thermal trip in the processor, another bit could indicate whether or not the processor slot is occupied by a terminator, and another bit could indicate whether or not there has been a booting error.
The data signals can be queried by system management or sent automatically by the sensor, for example, upon the occurrence of some specified event. Unfortunately, the algorithms in current system managements process the offsets at sensor level as a whole, instead of individual discrete offset level. This makes it difficult to handle the offsets efficiently and to easily adapt when changes are made to the hardware platform, and corresponding discrete sensors, in a computer system.